From this Tuesday, January 7, 2025, the campaign for the elections to the Aude Chamber of Agriculture officially begins. A look back at the forces present and the challenges of an important election while the agricultural crisis is raging.
In addition to technical and material support for farmers, the Chamber of Agriculture is an essential assembly for the profession. Hence the importance of these elections, the campaign for which was officially launched this Tuesday, January 7. At the helm of this institution in Aude, the elected majority has its say on structuring projects as well as on the subsidies granted to certain projects. And elected officials access positions in local representative bodies (training, land, environment). Which makes them privileged interlocutors of the State.
So who will succeed Philippe Vergnes at the head of the Aude Chamber of Agriculture? Farmers (farmers, employees, retirees, landowners, agricultural groups) within the jurisdiction of the Aude Chamber of Agriculture are asked to vote online or by post until January 31, 2025 to elect their professional representatives. The Névian winegrower and former leader of the Aude winegrowers' union, who had been elected on the FDSEA list twice, is not running for a third six-year term. He succeeded the emblematic Guy Giva, winemaker at Château St-Léon in Minervois, president from 1995 to 2013 under the banner of the same union.
It is therefore no surprise that the FDSEA list, led this time by the president of Vignerons Coopérators d'Occitanie and vice-president of Copa-Cogeca (a group defending agricultural interests at the European Commission), Ludovic Roux, who is still a big favorite. Especially since it is once again casting a wide net, unlike 2014 when the Young Farmers left on their own. This time the FDSEA/JA union list is supported by the Union of Winegrowers of Aude, the Independent Winegrowers, the Cooperation Agricole Occitanie (LCAO), the Union of Breeders of Aude (SELPA) and the Entrepreneurs of the Territories of Aude and Pyrénées-Orientales.
A voting method that favors whoever comes first
In Aude, it was the winegrower Antoine Verdale, president of the Trèbes cooperative cellar, president of the Chamber of Agriculture from 1972 to 1989 who undertook the rapprochement of the winegrower movement (this category represents more than half of the farmers in the department) with the FNSEA, a union marked to the right of the political spectrum, which advocates intensive and productivist agriculture. Powerful president of the National Confederation of Agricultural Cooperatives, this essential leader of Aude viticulture had, in 1985, announced that his own departmental federation would join the FNSEA. A clap of thunder in the land of the red south and the historic General Confederation of Winegrowers of the South (CGVM).
Today, while agriculture is in the midst of an existential crisis, the Rural Coordination and the Peasant Confederation, the two other lists present, would like to see the cards of the game redistributed. Facing the FNSEA, co-manager of French agriculture for more than 40 years, they have offered two different visions of agriculture. The Coordination was born in 1995 in the Gers, in reaction to the reform of the CAP in 1992 and in opposition to the FNSEA. Located on the right, even on the extreme right, it is opposed to free trade treaties, and generally to standards and regulations. The Confederation was created in 1987 by the coming together of two dissident currents born within the FNSEA itself. It is classified rather on the left. Far from intensive practices, it defends the peasantry and environmentally friendly agriculture.
In the last elections in Aude, the Rural Coordination and the Peasant Confederation obtained, in the most important constituency, that of farmers and the like, respectively 19% and 24% of the votes against 56% for the FDSEA/JA. But in the end, they had only collected two elected officials each. Because the voting method favors the one who comes first because he immediately obtains half of the seats. The rest is distributed according to the number of votes. This clarification is important since the €14 million from the union investment fund is distributed according to the number of votes and seats obtained. At the national level, the FNSEA/JA alliance has held, since 2019, all the chambers of agriculture, namely 84, except four when it only obtained 55% of the votes (21% for Rural Coordination and 19 % the Peasant Confederation).
